In the media:

Caleb Gardner is an insatiably curious strategy consultant with unique professional experience, from startups to nonprofits, from Fortune 100 clients to presidents. In addition to a career in the private sector at prestigious firms like Edelman and Bain & Company, Caleb was the lead digital strategist for President Obama’s political advocacy group, bringing his unique leadership to one of the largest digital programs in existence.

“The specific outcry and outrage at what he is saying is not necessarily being driven by the individual tweet itself as it is the general feeling that this election is a crisis turning point in our lifetimes, and that we need to be all hands on deck about getting Trump out of office,” says Caleb Gardner, who ran the @BarackObama Twitter account for much of the 44th president’s second term, and now runs digital strategy firm 18 Coffees. “That’s where Twitter tends to be a reflection of our political id instead of the quality or content of a given tweet.”

How did Twitter, invented to allow friends to keep track of each other's social lives and interests, become a key forum for political debate? And what effect has the social media platform had on the nature and quality of public life?

Presenter David Baker speaks to the man who taught President Trump everything he knows about Twitter, the head of President Obama's social media campaign, and Twitter's own leader on strategy for public policy, to explore the real effect that it has had on politics.

… Another drawback is that people don't log on to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram for the express purpose of making a charitable donation. "We go to social media to make friends, hear great stories and consume content," says Caleb Gardner, founder and managing partner at 18 Coffees, a digital strategy consultancy in Chicago. When nonprofits use social media to cultivate long-term relationships with donors, "you can have the trusted moments beyond the Giving Tuesdays of the world," he says.

The entrepreneur and one-time Obama staffer is putting his digital prowess to good use—literally. Having worked for Barack Obama for three years—running the former president’s Twitter account, no less—Caleb Gardner is no stranger to mission-driven work. But in recent years, he felt that digital efforts in that realm had sometimes been misguided. With his startup digital consulting firm 18 Coffees, he is “hoping to blow up the way people think about how digital problems are solved,” he says. The catch? He only takes on clients doing purposeful work.

Caleb Gardner is helping mission-based companies get a digital foothold through his consultancy. It’s a difficult landscape, but Gardner’s company, 18 Coffees knows that changing the world is no easy task.

Just three years after Iran’s crackdown on the Internet, in 2012, the country’s supreme leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei joined Instagram, a service technically banned by the state. @khamenei_ir has 4643 posts, 1.6 million followers and follows just 12 accounts on the popular photo sharing site owned by Facebook. Ayatollah Khamenei’s account is a far cry from the typical Instagram fare. Here you won’t find artistic portraits of a plate of chelo kebab or candid shots of the Ayatollah cuddling kittens. Instead, the page is filled with propaganda including videos of his speeches, some over a minute long. A feat that left many users wondering how the Supreme Leader managed to beat Instagram’s non-negotiable 15-second cut-off. It was a technical glitch, said Instagram.

Caleb Gardner is the founder of 18 Coffees, a digital content strategy and community development firm. Before that, Gardner worked as social media manager for Barack Obama. So, what has Gardner learned from working with one of the most powerful men in the world? What has he learned from collaborating with Fortune 500 clients at 18 Coffees?